High cart abandonment rate is one of the most frustrating things for any e-commerce business. You spend big bucks on optimizing your online store for the web. You hire top marketing professionals to increase your visibility in organic search and even run advertisements to attract visitors to your website.

Then, your customer reps work hard to help these visitors through live chat software and other media to further their buying journey. Finally they add an item to their cart.
But then you see that instead of making the payment and purchasing that item, they have suddenly left their pursuit and quit your website.

Sounds familiar? It will, because on an average 7 out of 10 users abandon their carts for most e-commerce websites.

Most customers abandon their carts because of one or more of the following reasons:

Complex checkout process

Website not optimized for mobile

High shipping rates or no shipping in their area

Lack of trust on your website

Long sign-up process

Too many distractions

Just researching

While you can’t do anything about the people who were just researching your site (which is not that bad, you can target them in other ways), you must focus on removing hurdles that keep visitors from proceeding with cart checkouts.

Here are some ways in which you can do so:

Ensure a Seamless Sign-Up Process

This seems obvious, but is still missing from most e-commerce sites. If you are asking users to sign-up for your website and furnish their complete details before they could make the purchase, they’ll rather quit.

You need to sign them up in multiple steps so that it doesn’t become overwhelming for these users. Take help of a UI/UX expert if you can.
Also, having a Facebook or Google signup can work wonders for your signup process as users can simply choose this option to furnish their details instead of signing up on yet another website.

And you absolutely need to have a guest checkout option to remain assured that you have options for every kind of user out there.

Optimize Checkout For Mobile Devices

More and more people are using their mobile phones to shop online. But still most e-commerce companies are optimizing their websites as per desktops only. You need to ensure that your online store and especially your checkout cart is suitable in terms of mobile operability.

Ensure that users do not have to scroll horizontally at all, while vertical scrolling should be kept to an absolute minimum. The best mobile checkout process involves no scrolling at all. Instead users are presented with one screen at a time just like in an app. Working for a compact screen that displays essential information without much scrolling can really help the case.

Simplify Navigation And Remove All Distractions

Another common mistake that is found on a lot of ecommerce websites is that they have a long and cluttered checkout process. It is not a rocket science that users would abandon their cart if they have to navigate through a labyrinth of distractions to finally reach the checkout.

Control all your urges to up-sell or cross-sell other products to your user. In fact don’t show related products or categories at all, and even hide the menu bar. There should be just a single call-to-action on every step of the checkout process.

Having an option for live chat support is generally a good thing, although you need to be cautious before jumping in to assist the user by carefully scrutinizing the situation.

Establish Security and Trust

A user might have come to your website for the first time, thanks to your marketing efforts. But if they are not familiar with your e-commerce store, there are high chances that they won’t take the risk of buying from you.

Unless you prove to them that you can be trusted with. You can gain new users’ trust by taking certain steps, like:

Providing social proof through customer testimonials

Displaying your Google trusted store rating clearly

Re-assuring them that any payment they make on this website is secured

A new user making a purchase on their first visit is a rare feat indeed, but you can boost your chances by taking these steps.

Avoid Unpleasant Surprises

Nothing repels potential customers from your website than the lack of transparency. If you have written free shipping on your product page that later asks for even a nominal fee, the end result is an abandoned cart. You should always be truthful in these small yet critical things. If the shipping is free for only above a certain amount, mention it clearly on the product page. Provide options to users for checking whether their area is serviceable by your website or not.

These are all small things, but are deal-breakers for your users. Other such instances can be when they are informed that their coupon code is invalid or the product that they need is out of stock just before making the payment.
There is very little chance that they’ll visit your website again for purchasing anything, and might even create a bad word of mouth publicity.

What to do with abandoned carts?

No matter how hard you try, there will definitely be abandoned carts. You can still take certain actions to convert these abandoned carts into sales.

Send email reminders

This is one of the best ways to facilitate conversion of abandoned carts. Simply shoot an email to the user with details of their cart, and allow them an option to resume their purchase journey. You can put in a special discount or create an urgency to improve your chances.

Re-marketing

Another great way is to leverage Facebook remarketing or Google remarketing. This way you can prompt such users to continue with their shopping by showing them dynamic ads.

Conclusion

Optimizing your cart checkout process is an art as well as science. It requires the psychological understanding of user behavior as well as intuition and common sense. Incorporate these strategies to boost your cart checkouts now!

Did You Enjoy This Article? Subscribe to our RSS Feed!

If you enjoyed this content, you can get automatic updates by subscribing to our RSS Feed. For those of you familiar with RSS you can follow Riches Corner via our RSS feed. Simply enter your email below and you’ll get one daily email notification of the posts published on Riches Corner that day.

Jason is a Sr. Technical Writer currently associated with ProProfs Live Chat Software. He enjoys writing about emerging customer support products, trends in customer support industry and the financial impacts of using such tools. In his spare time, Jason likes traveling extensively to learn about new cultures and traditions.

Did You Enjoy This Article? Subscribe to our RSS Feed!

If you enjoyed this content, you can get automatic updates by subscribing to our RSS Feed. For those of you familiar with RSS you can follow Riches Corner via our RSS feed. Simply enter your email below and you’ll get one daily email notification of the posts published on Riches Corner that day.